I was talking to a - male - programmer the other day, and he was telling me how much his high school CS teacher sucked. This is not an uncommon story. I know some good high school teachers. I've heard about a lot of bad ones. This particular bad one taught Visual Basic, and gave this ...
Recently, I heard about a school that has a mandatory "technology" class that students have to take in order to take CS classes in later years. It features: wood-working, circuit building, and Excel. This is horrifying. I want to go there with picket signs and stage a protest. Dress up as robots and chant things. If ...
My first proper day on my new project, and our PM says to me - "Cate, you seem to like to travel. How about you spend time in New York?" - I'm tasked with helping another team out, and being the bridge between that team and my team here. Initially I was a bit... thrown. Part ...
We took a whale watching boat in Lunenburg. As we pulled away from the pier, the tour guide talked about the history of the town. How many boats used to go out. Where the fish came in. Until the big fishing boats came, and drove out that way of life. He said, the old fisherman ...
Tina Seelig, author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (Amazon) teaches courses in Entrepreneurship and Creativity at Stanford. I was fascinated as to what teaching entrepreneurship would consist of (you can see the course list here). The big message I found in her book was about giving yourself permission - permission ...
Ali and I will presenting our paper 4 Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful (pdf) at the upcoming CICE Education conference in Toronto. Christine Alvarado of Harvey Mudd college came to Google last month to gave a talk on how they'd brought female enrollment in Computer Science up to 42%. The talk is called "Three Promising ...
The biggest difference I see between the education system here and in the UK is grading, and that creates some interesting differences in perspective. In Canada, marks in the 90's are commonplace. I actually got a 99 on one of my assignments - I was dying to know what caused the loss of a point, but ...
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - I had to read and study this for a class, and then we played Design Pattern Poker, where we "played" the design patterns we had in order to solve a problem. Seemed like nonsense at first, but then I read the book. And saw solutions that I'd been ...
When I left Ottawa, I had to find the new me to run my Processing Workshop. His name is Ali and he's awesome. He's had the idea to write up the ideas into a paper, so we're working on that at the moment, but it occurred to me that I didn't write much about it ...
They call Extreme Blue a leadership development program. I didn't get it at first, but by the end I did. I also started to see why I had been picked out as someone "showing leadership" - though I have so far to go there. It's around that time of year when I re-read 7 Habits (Amazon) ...
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